Mandy Sayer: 15 Kinds of Desire. Vintage, Australia 2001. I must confess that on a first reading of 15 Kinds of Desire I was somewhat disappointed, being confused about what the book was trying to achieve and thinking the title was a rather meaningless catchall phrase. Moreover the characters appeared on first glance to be little more than the kinds of social misfits who are popularly imagined to inhabit a place like Kings Cross. In the words of Scarlet, the child of the Cross, who opens the book, ‘Everyone’s strange around here’. Perhaps too, Sayer’s elegant, yet unassuming, writing style that worked so well in her autobiographical Dreamtime Alice led me to think that in a fictional work its characters lacked any real depth. However, on a second, and more thoughtful, reading, I discovered that the book has great depth and came to appreciate that it has been carefully crafted to reveal the consequences of the leviathan of desire that drives us all. The title and the theme then began to make sense: we live by our desires and cravings. They are what drive us forward BUT in the attainment of desire, in fulfilling our wishes and cravings, we are often led into strange and unexpected behaviours, to obsessions, amorality or even immorality, sometimes to self-destruction. In the story Leviathan, the young character puts it this way: ‘I was much less sure about the future. It seemed to me that every idea of happiness had some fine print you never got to see while you were still dreaming about it, while it was so far away in that netherworld of possibility. It was only after you’d worked so hard to be in it, and were now living the dream, that the footnote of small compromises became obvious; after you’d already signed the contract and were starting to feel a little too smug.’ At one level the characters that Sayer portrays are every suburban mother’s nightmare. For example, Scarlet, the child who knows how to shoot up with deadly accuracy; Ash the teenage brothel receptionist who by his own admission should be in high school ‘writing essays and taking exams’. Yet it’s a pity that our hypothetical suburban mother might be dismayed by this book and its characters, because careful reading would reveal her own desires and their unintended consequences, such as we see in the mother in Leviathan whose desire for family happiness takes on obsessive tendencies and who is (in a later story) killed off by her own sexual desire. Several of the 15 stories are set in Kings Cross and while the characters and their stories may be fictional, Sayer’s portrayal of the Kings Cross setting is, to a resident anyway, all too familiar. This lends an aura of reality to the fictional characters that inhabit the book. So we see Kings Cross as portrayed by Scarlet: ‘Electric neon pulsed across the footpath, bright pink outlines of naked women and signs flashing Live Sex, Pussycat, Love Machine.’ ‘The only person she recognised was the overweight woman who was banked up with plastic bags in the doorway of the closed real estate agency. She was spouting random numbers at everyone who passed by.’ And by Ash: I stop into the Bourbon and Beefsteak to get a packet of Longbeach. ... The place is really packed. Jackie Orszaczky and his band are playing ‘Make it Funky’, and there are all these navy guys on the dancefloor ... ’ ‘I walk down the dirty half mile, through the blinking neon lights. All I can smell is fried onions from the Korean takeaways. I pass that old plump hooker who looks like a high-school principal with her hair up in that bun and those granny glasses and a chain around her neck.’ It’s like that for me too, crazy yet familiar and ‘normal’. The book is carefully crafted in another way to reveal the random collisions of people and events that can push our lives in unexpected, and sometimes tragic, directions. On first glance it presents as a collection of short stories and indeed each story does stand alone and all exploit that genre with great effect. At the same time, as we move through the book we find with surprise that characters and incidents are connected to each other in ways that are sometimes random. At other times, a character’s story is continued in a new and unexpected direction. For example, in his haste to cross the street in Kings Cross Ash unwittingly causes a car accident that leads to Beau; in Leviathan the almost casual mention of a mother’s death ‘while she was travelling in Europe’ leads to The Collector ... To say more would be to give away the ‘plot’ - perhaps not the right word for this ingenious collection of fragments of human existence. Underlying it all is the simple message: if you sincerely want to live a normal, uneventful life, READ THE FINE PRINT! But of course we seldom, if ever, do. Mandy Sayer is well placed to write such a book as she reveals at the end in A True Story, the telling of a fragment of her own precarious childhood: ‘The Cross might have been a precarious paradise, but God, I was happy there in that humid season, in the amber light of later afternoon, when desire rose through me like a wave of vertigo, and everything in the future glowed in my imagination, brighter than a rush of neon.’

Reviewed by Elizabeth Kelly, 24 September 2001 Also published in CrossLines.